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Pharmaceuticals are environmental contaminants that have been widely detected in aquatic media. In this review, the occurrence of pharmaceuticals in the environment, its major causes, and implications along with effective procedures for their removal from contaminated water have been studied. Adsorption stands out as a promising treatment method, since it offers advantages such as lower energy consumption and simpler operation conditions in comparison to other tertiary treatments. Although commercial activated carbon is extensively studied as an adsorbent of pharmaceuticals, its large-scale application is limited by the high costs. Therefore, different nonconventional low-cost materials have been investigated and adsorbents based on clays, biochars, chitosan, agricultural and industrial wastes, and metal–organic frameworks have been addressed in many studies for pharmaceuticals uptake from water and wastewater. This article reviews key publications on this subject, discussing adsorption performance in terms of kinetics, equilibrium, thermodynamics, continuous fixed-bed process, regeneration capability, and historical, economical, and practical aspects.

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The rise of emerging contaminants in waters challenges the scientific community and water treatment stakeholders to design remediation techniques that are simple, practical, inexpensive, effective, and environmentally friendly. Emerging contaminants include antibiotics, hormones, illicit drugs, endocrine disruptors, cosmetics, personal care products, pesticides, surfactants, industrial products, microplastics, nanoparticles, and nanomaterials. Removing those contaminants is not easy because classical wastewater treatment systems are not designed to handle emerging contaminants, and contaminants often occur as traces in complex organo-mineral mixtures. Here, we review advanced treatments for the removal of emerging contaminants in wastewater, with focus on adsorption-oriented processes using non-conventional adsorbents such as cyclo-dextrin polymers, metal-organic frameworks, molecularly imprinted polymers, chitosan, and nanocellulose. We describe biological-based technologies for the degradation and removal of emerging contaminants. Then, we present advanced oxida-tion processes as the most promising strategies because of their simplicity and efficiency.